Middlesex Co. Man Gets 2 Years In Prison For Stealing From Employer

SOUTH PLAINFIELD, NJ — A Middlesex County man was sentenced to 27 months in prison for his role in a scheme to embezzle $2.37 million from his employer while he was the company’s controller, U.S. Attorney Philip Sellinger announced Wednesday.

Gerard Beauzile, 63, a South Plainfield resident, previously pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud. He was sentenced March 26 in Trenton federal court by a federal judge.

U.S. Attorneys say that from 2014 through December 2020, Beauzile abused his position as controller of a New York-based company to embezzle funds. He issued fraudulent company checks to himself and then deposited those checks into his bank account for his own personal benefit.

Beauzile issued approximately 140 company checks to himself, with a total value of $2.37 million.

Beauzile concealed the theft from the company by falsely entering the fraudulent checks into the company’s accounting system under various company vendor names as the payees, causing the accounting system to falsely reflect that the checks were made payable to company vendors instead of to Beauzile.

He also falsified vendor invoices to correspond to the entries made in the accounting system, and company bank statements by removing and altering opening, running, and closing balances, check payment entries, summary check listings and inter-account transfers.

In addition to the prison term, Judge Shipp sentenced Beauzile to three years of supervised release and ordered that he forfeit $2.37 million and pay it back to the company.